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28 Days of Fame: The Strange, True Story of 'Flappy Bird'

mashable.com

Mashable

In just a few weeks, the mobile app Flappy Bird became a global phenomenon. It was a simple game, but frustrating and endless. Sharing many similarities with the famous Helicopter Game — only with Super Nintendo-style graphics — it’s safe to say Flappy Bird took over the web.

The game was designed and built by Dong Nguyen, a developer who lives in Vietnam. Nguyen previously made a number of iOS and flash games for his mobile studio .Gears.

The story of Flappy Bird — its sudden rise and equally sudden fall — is hard to pin down. That’s partially because Nguyen, overwhelmed by the popularity of the game, has declined press requests for interviews. [Update: Shortly after we posted this story, Forbes tracked down Nguyen in Hanoi, where he revealed that Flappy Bird is “gone forever’ because, essentially, it was addictive.]

Still, using Twitter data from Topsy, Nguyen’s Twitter stream and app-ranking data from App Annie, we’ve managed to put together a timeline of the game.

Much of the data surrounding Flappy Bird and its viral success came courtesy of Zach Williams, a developer who analyzed the numbers behind the game.

Williams scraped all of the written app reviews from Flappy Bird in iTunes before the game was removed; this yielded a database of more than 68,000 written reviews, and he was kind enough to share a CSV file of that data with Mashable. Using it, we were able to look for trends around when the app started to gain traction, its ratings and the general user sentiment surrounding it.

The game’s sheer success has led some critics to accuse Nguyen of using shady practices — including buying traffic or paying for fake reviews — in order to help Flappy Bird ascend the app charts. After looking at the data that corresponds to when Flappy Bird started to build word-of-mouth buzz, however, we can’t find any signs of impropriety, or manipulation of reviews or ratings.

The fact that Flappy Bird wasn’t a scam — but a naturally occurring spectacle that came out of nowhere — only makes its triumph that much more incredible and its removal from the App Store that much more bittersweet.

What follows is a strange story about a simple game called Flappy Bird and the roller-coaster ride that followed.

The Beginning

The digital origins of Flappy Bird date back to November 2012. At the time, Nguyen shared an image of a game he was working on via Twitter:

If you look at the left side of the image, you can see what looks like an early version of Flappy Bird’s protagonist.

Nothing more about the game was mentioned. Later, Nguyen would say that the character originated from a game he started working on, but scrapped.

Then, in April 2013, Nguyen shared the first splash screen for a new iOS game called Flap Flap:

The game had Nintendo-style graphics, and looked inviting. Nguyen said he managed to build Flap Flap in just two days.

A month goes by with no update on Flap Flap. As it turns out, there was already another app with that name in the App Store. Nguyen renamed the game Flappy Bird.

Flappy Bird made its App Store debut on May 24, 2013. Nguyen tweeted his high score from the game’s share screen. Note that the hashtag is #flapflap — the name of the original game.

He also shared a direct download link to the game.

The Calm Before the Storm

After releasing Flappy Bird, Nguyen appeared to abandon both it and his Twitter account. According to app-review data pulled from the App Store (before the game was removed), the game attracted just 13 reviews between May 25 and Oct. 31. Written reviews aren’t a perfect measure of download figures — as far more users download a game than take the time to write a review — but the app was practically invisible.

In September 2013, Nguyen released his first update to Flappy Bird. It fixed a few bugs, and he added a new icon for iOS 7.

The game continued to toil in obscurity for another six weeks. Then, something interesting happened. Flappy Bird entered the “Family” category at 1469 on Oct. 29, 2013, which means it was the 1469th most popular Family game in the App Store, according to App Annie.

A few days later, Flappy Bird made its first appearance on Twitter aside from Nguyen’s initial tweets.

This tweet, sent on Nov. 4, is emblematic of the reviews, tweets and commentary many others would share three months later.

On Nov. 14, Flappy Bird entered the U.S. game charts, coming in at 1368, according to AppAnnie. By this time, the game had climbed to 393 in the Family category.

The game started to gain traction in those two categories through the month of November. Reviews increased, too. Flappy Bird managed to earn 20 reviews in November. Many of those reviews expressed a love-hate relationship with the game.

One review, entitled “Love/hate/live,” sums it up:

I have a love/hate relationship with this game and it’s so addicting
It’s a great game though. I can’t get past 15:(

Gaining Traction

On Dec. 3, 2013, Flappy Bird officially entered the overall App Store charts, coming in at 1308 in the U.S. At this time, the game was ranked 74 in Family and 395 in U.S. games.

The game continued to rise in popularity. On Dec. 11, Nguyen returned to his Twitter account, and replied to a user asking for an Android version of the app.

By Dec. 13, the game had cracked the top 250 for free apps in the U.S., the top 80 for U.S. games and ranked 14 in Family.

Twitter users started to tweet more about the game, creating rage graphics and memes related to their frustrations. Nguyen retweeted some of the more humorous images:

Flappy Bird also started gaining 20 reviews a day. The game proved polarizing, with most of the ratings either a full five stars or one star, with many expressing the “I hate this game, but cannot stop playing” sentiment.

Finding Success

Flappy Bird’s popularity continued to climb into January 2014. On Jan. 10, the app achieved a major milestone: It became a top-10 app in the United States. It was ranked the eighth-most-downloaded free app in the U.S. and the sixth-most-downloaded free game.

“Flappy Bird” breaks into the top 10 in the App Store.

Image: App Annie

Other game developers took notice, and asked Nguyen if he did anything to promote Flappy Bird to get it into the top 10. Nguyen replied that he “doesn’t do promotion.” He also expressed excitement, as the app continued to climb higher in the App Store.

Flappy Bird download levels swelled on Jan. 13, increasing 136% day-over-day. On Jan. 17, the app became the number-one free app in the U.S. App Store, according to app-analytics company Distimo.

Flappy Bird was a bonafide hit. And it would only get bigger.

On Jan. 22, Nguyen announced that an Android version of the game was available in Google Play.

Within a week, it became the most-download app on Google Play.

By Jan. 24, the media was finally starting to take notice of Flappy Bird. Buzzfeed and Kotaku wrote articles expressing surprise at the app’s level of success. Developers began dissecting the game, and praising its virality.

It’s here that Flappy Bird really started to take off on Twitter. Tweets with the phrase “Flappy Bird” passed the 500,000 a day mark as of Jan. 25, according to Topsy.

The flurry of media coverage intensified, with a significant uptick happening at the end of January. Publications such as The Huffington Post, The Telegraph and Mashable all wrote about the game that appeared out of nowhere.

By Feb. 1, Flappy Bird was the number-one free game in 53 countries in the App Store.

On Feb. 6, Apple even acknowledged the game’s success, tweeting about it from its official App Store Twitter account.

Asking Why

As January became February, Flappy Bird was responsible for millions of downloads a day on iOS and Android. As it became a success, media outlets started to reach out to Nguyen to talk to him about the game.

Nguyen was fairly guarded with most press, but did do a few interviews, including with game blog Chocolate Lab Apps and TechCrunch. In both interviews, Nguyen chalked up the game’s success to pure luck.

He told TechCrunch, “I don’t know how my games can be so popular. Most of my players are kids in schools. I would like to thanks them for playing my game and sharing it to other people.”

Reporters started looking into the psychological reasons behind Flappy Bird’s success, and app developers also wanted to know its secret. Once the app reached the top 10 in the App Store, developers started asking Nguyen about his strategies for making it successful.

A common question was whether he bought traffic (i.e. paying for exposure that leads to downloads) for Flappy Bird, or used cross-promotional techniques to raise the download counts on his other apps.

For his part, Nguyen maintained that he did nothing to help juice the ratings or download figures for Flappy Bird.

However, some commentators were skeptical. On Feb. 1, app marketer Carter Thomas speculated that Flappy Bird’s success was due in part to reviews left by bots.

It’s not uncommon for some developers to try to juice rankings or ratings for an app by paying for bots to leave positive reviews. However, this pattern usually becomes obvious because the reviews all contain the same sentence, phrase or group of phrases.

When asked about Thomas’ post via Twitter, Nguyen responded diplomatically.

Thomas’ blog post was picked up by The Telegraph and Newsweek.

Nguyen refused to answer any questions about his methods, asking the press to leave him alone.

In one of his tweets to a Newsweek reporter, Nguyen made a valid point: If he was cheating, why would he still be in the App Store?

The Price of Success

Questions over how Flappy Bird achieved such dizzying success became even more frequent when it was revealed that Nguyen was making $50,000 a day in ads off of the game.

That figure was first revealed to The Verge, and it immediately increased backlash against the game.

Kotaku was especially harsh on the game, writing an op-ed originally entitled “Flappy Bird is Making $50,000 a Day Off of Ripped-Off Art.” (Kotaku has since changed the headline and parts of the article.)

Some users began calling out Nguyen over Twitter. In the beginning, he seemed to take the attention with good humor.

By the time February rolled around, however, it was clear that Flappy Bird’s success and the attention Nguyen got as a result, was impacting his life for the worse.

Nguyen said he was receiving hate tweets, death threats and repeated harassment over the game.

Nguyen appeared overwhelmed by the app’s popularity, which he expressed via Twitter on Feb. 7.

These tweets were mocked by some outlets, which only exacerbated the negative attention toward Nguyen.

After originally promising to build a Windows Phone version of the game, Nguyen seemed ready to throw in the towel last week.

Nguyen had uploaded an update to Flappy Bird for iOS on Feb. 3. The update was approved on Feb. 8. It included graphical changes to the game, and actually made it a bit easier. Because the update was released when Flappy Bird was at its peak popularity, feedback from some users was negative.

The End

A few hours after the 1.2 update for Flappy Bird for iOS was released, Nguyen seemed dejected on Twitter.

Then, at around 2:30 p.m. ET on Feb. 8, Nguyen made a stunning announcement: Flappy Bird was going to go away.

Users on Twitter and other social-media sites were stunned that the game had disappeared. Some suggested that it was all a publicity stunt. It wasn’t. By Feb. 9, Flappy Bird was removed from the App Store and Google Play.

In its place, a plethora of carbon copies and similar games popped up. Users are even selling phones with the game installed for outrageous sums on eBay.

Nguyen remains silent, and hasn’t responded to multiple requests for comment.

It’s now been 28 days since Flappy Bird hit the App Store’s top 10. The game has had at least 50 million downloads, and amassed nearly 16 million tweets.

It is the perfect example of how a mundane app with an addictive premise can go viral, thanks to social media and word of mouth. What’s more, Flappy Bird was a success because it didn’t fit the mold. Anyone trying to create the next Flappy Bird will likely fail — this was a perfect storm of circumstance, luck and viral drive.

It seems fitting that the app left the world with as much mystery as it entered.

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mashable.com

Flappy Bird is proof that no one knows what the audience wants

polygon.com

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Everyone in the games industry is trying to figure out what “the people” want.

The big players in the AAA sector believe the people want military shooters and open-world games full of the old ultra violence. The indie community believes that what people really want is experimental games with heart and a unique visual sensibility. And puzzle platformers. And roguelikes.

The mobile and social game companies, like Zynga and King, are of the opinion that people want something inoffensive to click on every now and then, but not too often, unless they’ve got cash to spend.

Recently, the people have spoken, and what they’ve said might come as a shock to many of the prognosticators and taste makers across the video game business. It turns out that what the people really want, for the moment at least, is Flappy Bird.

Flappy Bird is a very simple game for smartphones where the player taps on the screen to make their bird avatar pop slightly higher into the air. Tap rapidly and the bird will begin to climb quickly, but stop tapping and the bird will plummet like a rock. Once this mechanic is mastered the only task is to fly the bird through narrow gaps in an endless series of pipes.

As you might expect, this is easier said than done.

Created by a single indie developer in Vietnam, Dong Nguyen, Flappy Bird is currently being downloaded several million times a day and as of this writing sits atop the charts in both the iOS App Store and the GooglePlay Store.

This has come as a surprise to many people, most of all Nguyen himself. The game doesn’t seem like something that would capture the hearts and fingers of millions of gamers, as it has no marketing, no story, no established IP, no viral hooks, no levels, no candy, no visual sophistication, no cross promotion and no achievements.

What Flappy Birds teaches us about what “the people” want

First, they want games about birds. If Tiny Wings and Angry Birds weren’t enough to convince you of this then Flappy Bird, with its malformed duck-like avatar, should settle the matter. Indeed, people are so crazy about birds that they won’t care that the bird in Flappy Bird appears to be a horrifying cycloptic version of Cheep Cheep, the flying fish enemy from the third Super Mario Bros.

Second, polish does not matter. Not only is the visual language of Flappy Bird almost entirely re-appropriated from early NES games, but it seems to be engineered and designed by someone still learning how to create games. There are frequent slowdowns and animation glitches in the Android version but, more importantly, Flappy Bird has absolutely no sense of what indie game developers call “feel.”

The hitboxes are ridiculously large, which is the source of much of the game’s difficulty. The flapping mechanic, while serviceable, is entirely ordinary. It looks and feels like a game design student’s first project in their intro to programming class.

Third, people want games that are bone-crushingly difficult, but not punishing. Probably the most commented on aspect of the game is just how hard it is to maneuver your cyclops-duck through the endless gaps between pipes, which constitutes the game’s only challenge.

It feels like finding yourself in a quiet countryside after living your whole life in a noisy city

A single mistake, even a light brush of one pixel from the bird against a pipe will result in instant death. This sends your avatar plunging face-first to the ground, its single eye suddenly vacant. This setback doesn’t last for long, as the game makes it easy to make another run for a new high score.

The generosity of this easy restart has gotten commented on less than it should, perhaps because for most game developers it’s a benevolence they take for granted.

For those discussing the mobile space this might seem like a wasted opportunity. After all, that’s where the micro-transactions are supposed to go! The absence of any upselling and the swift return to the task at hand is what’s addicting about the game, and a little off-putting. It feels like finding yourself in a quiet countryside after living your whole life in a noisy city.

Finally, and most importantly, we should learn once and for all that we will never really know what ‘the people’ want. The screenwriter and novelist William Goldman famously suggested that in Hollywood “nobody knows anything.” The success of Flappy Bird is above all a reminder that this maxim is as true in game development as it is in movie making.

Flappy Bird has been compared to Dark Souls on the basis that both are very difficult, but the more fundamental commonality is that they both serve as wake up calls to their respective parts of the game industry. In 2011, Hidetaka Miyazaki’s gothic, mysterious, complicated and punishing masterpiece became a huge success despite bucking many of the trends of the AAA industry as a whole. Never again could journalists and executives and developers pretend that, for better or for worse, all people wanted was over-the-top roller coasters with larger-than-life characters firing at each other from behind cover.

Now, three years later, the same wake up call has been given to the burgeoning mobile game space. Years from now, whenever an executive talks about how they’ve cracked the code for keeping players hooked and reeling in the whales, or a marketer begins laying out their intricate plan to make some game a viral success, or a game developer talks about refining their addicting new mechanic, there will be one exception to their plans and models and “industry wisdom” so large they’ll always have to mention it:

Flappy Bird.

Charles Pratt is a game designer and Assistant Arts Professor at the NYU Game Center, where he teaches game design, theory and history.

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The Squalid Grace of Flappy Bird

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The Squalid Grace of Flappy Bird

Why playing stupid games staves off existential despair

Ian Bogost Feb 3 2014, 12:07 PM ET

Games are grotesque.

I’m not talking about games like Grand Theft Auto or Manhunt, games whose subjects are moral turpitude, games that that ask players to murder, maim, or destroy. I mean games in general, the form we call “games.” Games are gross, revolting heaps of arbitrary anguish. Games are encounters with squalor. You don’t play a game to experience an idea so much as you do so in an attempt to get a broken machine to work again.

In this way, games are different from other media. Sure, a movie or a book or a painting can depict squalor, can attune us to the agony of misfortune. But unlike film and literature, games do not primarily depict human events and tell stories. And unlike sports, games do not primarily showcase physical prowess. We don’t watch or read games like we do cinema and novels and paintings, nor do we perform them like we might dance or football or Frisbee. Rather, we do something in-between with games. Yes, we “play” games like we do sports, and yes, games bear “meaning” as do the fine and plastic arts. But something else is at work in games. Games are devices we operate.

Sometimes that operation simulates piloting a mecha or a pro athlete or a space marine, but more frequently it entails more mundane activities: moving cards between stacks as in Klondike solitaire; swapping adjacent gems as in Bejeweled; directing a circular, discarnate maw as in Pac-Man. Some machinery is fantastic, but most is ordinary, forgettable, broken.

If you look past the familiar shimmer of Super Mario Bros. and Super Bowl Sunday, there in the middle you will find the unsung paragons of gaming: games like Chess and Go and Backgammon; Tic-Tac-Toe and Dots and Boxes and Crosswords; Monopoly and Candy Land and Sorry!. These are games that frustrate more than they titillate, because operating them involves minimal effort yet considerable misery. It’s not the misery of boredom or stupidity, but the misery of repetition. The misery of knowing what you want to accomplish but not being able to, whether thanks to the plodding pace of a child’s board game, or the bottomless strategic depth of a folk classic. Whereas football yields its beauty through the practiced triumph of the human body and will over circumstance, Sorry! delivers only the stupid, gratuitous anguish caused by our decision to play it in the first place.

Every now and then a game comes along that forces us to admit this inconvenient truth of games. Recently, we have been graced with such a one, a free mobile throwaway called Flappy Bird. The game was first released last summer, but as the year wound down it experienced an unexpected surge in popularity. By the start of 2014, the game had nested itself at the top of the Apple App Store free charts.

Flappy Bird is a stupid game. You control a bird so cute as to signal deformity. Tapping the screen causes the bird to flap, making it rise slightly before quickly falling. The game asks only that you pilot the bird through narrow passageways between two green, Super Mario-style pipes that issue from the top and bottom of the screen. A point is awarded for every pipe you pass. But touch anything and the cute bird tumbles beak-first into the ground: game over.

Game over in Flappy Bird

Flappy Bird is a perversely, oppressively difficult game. Scoring even a single point takes most players a considerable number of runs. After an hour, I’d managed a high score of two. Many, many hours of play later, my high score is 32, a feat that has earned me the game’s gold medal (whatever that means).

There is a tradition of such super-difficult games, sometimes called masocore among the videogame-savvy. Masocore games are normally characterized by trial-and-error gameplay, but split up into levels or areas to create a sense of overall progress. Commercial blockbusters like Mega Man inaugurated the category (even if the term “masocore” appeared long after Capcom first released that title in 1987), and more recent independent titles like I Wanna Be The Guy and Super Meat Boy have further explored the idea of intense difficulty as a primary aesthetic. Combined with repetition and progression, the intense difficulty of masocore games often produces a feeling of profound accomplishment, an underdog’s victory in the dorky medium of underdogs themselves, 2d platformer videogames.

Left: Mega Man (Capcom, 1987), Right: Super Meat Boy (Team Meat, 2008-2010)

Even though Flappy Bird borrows from the same platformer tradition, it’s no masocore game. For one part, masocore is more of an aesthetic community than it is a material aesthetic; like the poetry and painting that emerged from the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, masocore games arise from a dedication to a particular kind of play experience, or perhaps even more so a disgust with the rise of facile, “everybody wins” casual games since the turn of the millennium.

But Flappy Bird is not difficult because it wants to oppose any regime in particular; a fact made flesh by its deployment on the mobile platforms that have only accelerated casual play. Flappy Bird is not difficult to challenge you, nor even to teach the institution of videogames a thing or two. Rather, Flappy Bird is difficult because that’s how it is. It is a game that is indifferent, like an iron gate rusted shut, like the ice that shuts down a city. It’s not hard for the sake of your experience; it’s just hard because that’s the way it is. Where masocore games want nothing more than to please their players with pain and humiliation (thus their appropriation of the term “masochism”), Flappy Bird just exists. It wants nothing and expects even less.

The game seems to have come from out of nowhere. It was created by a lone, 29 year-old Vietnamese developer named Dong Nguyen, who has mostly denied requests for press interviews after the explosive success of his game. Nguyen operates under the shingle .GEARS, which has released several other games with a similar avant-pixel aesthetic and simple gameplay. While tech press outlets accustomed to megalomaniac entrepreneurs motivated only by fame and wealth have reframed the creator’s timidity as “mystery,” Nguyen’s own words likely explain the situation more accurately: “The popularity could be my luck.”

Nguyen’s status as outsider artist may be the key to the game’s deftly indifferent design, even if it can’t explain its success. .GEARS’ earlier games are much rougher and less refined than Flappy Bird. In Shuriken Block, the player taps on the screen to deflect throwing stars that would otherwise lodge in the heads of a row of cute pixel samurai. A correct tap issued more quickly yields more points than one at the last minute. But an observant player can simply turn the game into a joke, tapping constantly at the top of the screen to achieve as high a score as patience affords. In Super Ball Juggling, the player taps the right and left sides of the screen to individually control two soccer players juggling balls that rise to different heights with each bounce. After a few singular practice juggles, balls appear simultaneously on both sides, and the player must struggle against the absence of a continuous rhythm to perform well at the game.

.GEARS games before Flappy Bird include Shuriken Block (left) and Super Ball Juggling (right)

But rather than improving upon these and other game design techniques, Flappy Bird actually regresses, offering fewer rather than more crutches for either novice or expert play. It even withdraws from the gentler onboarding of Super Ball Juggling. Contemporary design practice surely would recommend an “easy” first pipe sequence to get the player started, perhaps a few pipes positioned at the bird’s initial position, or with wider openings for easier passage. More difficult maneuvers, such as quick shifts from high to low pipe openings, would be reserved for later in the game, with difficulty ramping up as the player demonstrates increased expertise.

But Flappy Bird offers no such scaffolding. Instead, every pipe and every point is completely identical: randomly positioned but uniform in every other way. A game of Flappy Bird is a series of identical maneuvers, one after the other. All you have to do is keep responding to them, a task made possible by the game’s predictable and utterly reasonable interactions. Just keep flapping.

This indifference to player capacity and expectation makes Flappy Bird a particularly earnest device to operate. Many players have expressed astonishment and distress at their simultaneous hatred for and commitment to the game—“I Hate Flappy Bird, But I Can’t Stop Playing It”—essentially concluding that the game is just another “addictive” trifle, a curiosity that cannot be understood despite spilling ink in the effort. Meanwhile, the tech press continues its tendency to present business as aesthetics, limiting its coverage of Flappy Bird to the game’s viral success (it’s enjoying millions of daily downloads). It also explains the gold-rush insurgence of copycat games like Ironpants, which mistake Flappy Bird’s surprise success for a predictable design pattern rather than a confluence of accidents.

The Flappy Bird-alike, Ironpants, by Eduardas Klenauskis

In game design circles, we sometimes wax poetic about the elegance and simplicity of a design, the way complex emergent behaviors can arise from simple rules and structures. This is why game designers tend to love games like Go and Tetris—tiny flowers that betray their simplicity by divulging endless fractal blossoms.

But in fetishizing simplicity, we also mistake the elegance of design for beauty. For Go and Tetris are likewise ghastly, erupting stones and tetrominoes endlessly, failing to relent in their desire to overtake us. The games we find ourselves ever more devoted to are often also the ones that care very little for our experience of them. This is the devotion of material indifference. To understand Flappy Bird, we must accept the premise that games are squalid, rusty machinery we operate in spite of themselves. What we appreciate about Flappy Bird is not the details of its design, but the fact that it embodies them with such unflappable nonchalance. The best games cease to be for us (or for anyone) and instead strive to be what they are as much as possible. From this indifference emanates a strange squalor that we can appreciate as beauty.

Let me explain what I mean. Yesterday I spent two hours attempting to fix a bathroom cabinet drawer pull that comes unattached on one side, hanging despondently at the bottom of the vanity. I detached the hardware and confirmed that the handle happily accepted the machine screw into its threads, but somehow the two weren’t meshing when set in the drawer front. I drilled to widen the hole through which the screw passed, noting that the screw seemed to require a precise orthogonal orientation in order to thread properly. I swapped both orientations and screws, thinking that I’d achieve a more accurate alignment. I deployed penlights and vice grips. My family began receding ever further into the house, aware of the dark shadow that grew from the bathroom, where an oiled bronze drawer pull siphoned out vitality from our residence and, perhaps, from the universe itself.

The author’s now-repaired bathroom cabinet drawer pull

A commitment to Flappy Bird is akin to the sensation after two hours splayed on the floor of your bathroom, when you still haven’t managed to reattach the cabinet pull that somehow won’t stay attached to the drawer, even though the hardware happily accepts the machine screw when you hold both pieces in your hand. Emergence is also chaos, and its charm is the beauty of a universe that could have been nothing, but turned out to be something instead. That something is both revolting and divine, and we cheat ourselves when we take the one alone without the other.

Compared to other games, Flappy Bird offers a more ardent take on unconcern. Instead of relying on the exploding permutational space of a few, easily memorizable gestures, it relies on the cold fury of sheer repetition instead. Like Candy Land, that scourge of preschools and pediatrician offices, Flappy Bird demands only that you do the same thing again and again, until something else interrupts you—and then it removes the only guarantee of interruption Candy Land affords, that of a certain victory and an excuse to put the game away.

And not for lack of other options, either. Flappy Bird is hardly a new design—it follows in the footsteps of a genre now known as the “endless runner,” named after the 2009 mobile hit Canabalt, in which players help a man outrun an unseen threat that destroys the city whose rooftops he traverses to escape. Canabalt begat similar titles, including the massive hit Temple Run, whose sequel was installed over 50 million times in two weeks.

Canabalt (Adam Saltsman / Semi-Secret Software, 2009)

The endless runner itself has a lineage, which Flappy Bird likewise spurns. Writing in The New Yorker last year, Simon Parkin traced the origins of the genre first to a frequently-recreated DOS game with a helicopter in an endless tunnel, and before that to a 1983 Commodore 64 game, B.C.’s Quest For Tires, based on the classic caveman comic strip by Johnny Hart. But even three decades ago, B.C.’s Quest For Tires offers more sophistication than Flappy Bird. The caveman on his stone unicycle must avoid multiple obstacles—jumping rocks, ducking under trees, avoiding rolling stones, and so forth—while enduring regular increases in the speed of progress.

Set in relief against its precursors, Flappy Bird seems positively minimalist. The zen garden school of design would encourage us to interpret this choice as more rather than less sophisticated: by removing all unnecessary elements, the purity of the endless runner is revealed. This sounds good on paper, but the experience of Flappy Bird betrays it. “Surely something else will happen?” asks the Flappy Bird player, over and over. But nothing ever does. This isn’t a surplus of design thanks to unadornment, but a brazen opposition to modernist elegance by means of the austere design that tradition holds so dear. This discomfort echoes all throughout the Flappy Bird experience. Is it just a bad minimalist runner, or is it purposely disparaging the genre it adopts?

The answer is neither: Flappy Bird is not amateurish nor sociopathic. Instead, it is something more unusual. It is earnest. It is exactly what it is, and it is unapologetic. Not even unapologetic—stoic, aloof. Impervious. Like a meteorite that crashed through a desert motel lobby, hot and small and unaware.

Playing Flappy Bird is like fixing an unfixable drawer pull, one that will never reattach correctly, one that you know will never do, but persisting in the face of such torpor nevertheless. Flappy Bird is a condition of the universe, even if it is one that didn’t exist until it was hand-crafted by a Vietnamese man who doesn’t want to talk about it. A condition in the sense of a circumstance, but also in the sense of a blight, a sickness, a stain we cannot scrub out but may in time be willing to accept. A stain like our own miserable, tiny existences as players, which we nevertheless believe are more fundamental than the existence of bird flapping games or machine screws or the cold fog rising against the melting snow in the morning. Because the game cares so little for your experience of it, you find yourself ever more devoted to it. 

We like to think of games as an entertainment medium on the move. As a contender to replace (or at least to match) the influence and appeal of literature, film, painting, dance, sculpture. As a way of presenting ideas and experiences through our most contemporary of vessels, the computer. We may often play games because they affect us, because they allow us to be someone fantastic and unassailable. But games are also ancient, and ancient things teach us humility. Just as often, we play games because they are there to be played. Because we want to feel what it’s like to play them. Because we are not clever or strong or fast, but because we can move stones on wooden boards or shift cards between virtual spaces on cardboard or tap a capacitive display to flap a tiny bird.

We play games because games are stupid, like drawer pulls are stupid. Flappy Bird is a game that accepts that it is stupid to be a game. It offers us an example of what it might feel like to conclude that this is enough. That it’s enough for games just to be crap in the universe, detritus that we encounter from time to time and that we might encounter as detritus rather than as meaning. That we might stop to manipulate them without motive or reason, like we might turn a smooth rock in our palms before tossing it back into the big ocean, which devours it. For no matter how stupid it is to be a game, it is no less stupid to be a man who plays one.

Ian Bogost is a writer, game designer, and contributing editor at . He is the Ivan Allen College Distinguished Chair in media studies and a professor of interactive computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

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On Success

mikebithell.tumblr.com

Oh boy am I about to get some angry responses.

Disclaimer: My objective is not to compare the challenges of success to anyone else’s problems. There are obviously millions of situations worse than achieving your dreams. I’ve been in some of them, but, given my privilege, there are a multitude I cannot even imagine. This is intended as a post to encourage understanding of a very specific issue, which I’m semi qualified to talk about. I sincerely hope it’s taken as such.

Being successful, suddenly, is something that happens to a small number of devs a year. There are different kinds of success, financial, cultural, even personally successful to your own objectives. I’m going to specifically talk about success that equals attention, which is more focused (unfortunately) on the financial side of things. And a vast majority of indies want financial success. They don’t necessarily want to be millionaires (I know I really don’t) but they’d love to be able to pay their rent, eat food, look after their loved ones, all by doing the thing they love. It is a big deal.

And only a few people a year get there.

When they get successful, they tend to take some time to thank everyone, visit a few events, start another game. But at all times they ensure they smile down the camera, stay humble, and do as much as they can to help others, and above all, stay happy and not complain.

In private, most of the indies I’ve met who’ve achieved ‘the dream’ they set out to achieve share a number of problems. I think being aware of these issues ahead of time may help the indies who are going to hit it big in 2014 and beyond. Maybe this’ll ease someone’s time. List!

Your body will be wrecked

All those late nights you’ve been mythologising? The energy drinks you’ve been relying on? The shitty chair you’ve been sat in? Not leaving the house because fuck it, microwave meals are fine and take less time away from code? Yeah. That’ll hit you, because you’ll let it. I spent some time in hospital last year, many, many other indies have too. I wish I could slap that idiot pulling all nighters on TWA in the face and tell him to go for a jog. I can’t. I can tell you to.

You will have lost a lot of friends

This is a time thing. I know my work killed my social life. This might be specific to certain personality types, but yeah, I drifted from some folks. Don’t. Or do, but be aware that it’s happening. I know a few devs who lost their partners during dev. I am grateful for Kerry.

The internet will hate you

Because you’re fat. Because you’re ugly. Because you’re hot. Because you are a woman, or god help you, a person of colour. They will believe you don’t deserve it. They will chase you down, find out personal info, the works. Journalists and bloggers might weigh in too, if they think it’s worth the clicks.

This is the one where folk who’ve not been there always jump in with ‘haters gonna hate’. Those people have not received 100 emails of bile in an hour. I got lucky in this regard, the internet decided I was ‘nice’. I am aware of how arbitrary that decision was.

You will feel guilty

You know you don’t deserve it. You’re racked by impostor syndrome. You know of like 10 other games that came out last month that deserve it more than you. Why do you get to be the one who’s dreams come true? If you’re from humble beginnings, the money side of it makes it worse.

You will be shocked

This is a hard one to articulate, but humans suck at immediate change. Going to sleep with the universe and your life one way, and waking up with everything turned around will mess with your head, regardless of how positive the change is. It does weird things to folks, in various ways.

You won’t know what to do next

It’s easier when no one cares. Now people have expectations. That’s going to feed into the stress too. All those bullshit ideas you had for when the game was done don’t seem to match the impossible expectations all these ‘fans’ seem to have.

People will turn nasty

Someone in your personal life will turn out to be a dick. Money, visibility, something will change your relationship, and that’s going to be weird.

So just some notes. Go be awesome, but do anything you can to prepare for any of the nastiness above.

mikebithell.tumblr.com

Exclusive: Flappy Bird Creator Dong Nguyen Says App 'Gone Forever' Because It Was 'An Addictive Product'

forbes.com

Game Over. (credit: Hoang Dinh Nam/AFP/Getty Images)

The mysterious developer of the world’s most popular free app, who drew global attention this past weekend with his sudden decision to remove it, tells Forbes that Flappy Bird is dead. Permanently.

“Flappy Bird was designed to play in a few minutes when you are relaxed,” says Dong Nguyen, in an exclusive interview, his first since he pulled the plug on the app. “But it happened to become an addictive product. I think it has become a problem. To solve that problem, it’s best to take down Flappy Bird. It’s gone forever.”

In killing Flappy Bird for what he maintains are altruistic reasons, Nguyen is walking away from a jackpot. An article in the Verge last week estimated his daily take from in-app advertising at $50,000. Nguyen declined to confirm that number. “I don’t know the exact figure, but I do know it’s a lot.”

The circumstances surrounding the interview, conducted in Vietnamese, were as much of a soap opera as his public ruminations about whether to take down the app. The interview with Forbes took place in a hotel in Hanoi, with a strict condition that Forbes not reveal Nguyen’s face. It was delayed several hours, in part because Nguyen had a sudden meeting with Vietnam’s deputy prime minister Vu Duc Dam – a remarkable turn of events for someone unknown a week ago. Nguyen says his parents didn’t even know that Flappy Bird existed, much less his role in it, until media coverage spun out of control in the past few days.

The 29-year-old, who sports a close-cropped haircut, appeared stressed. He smoked several cigarettes over the course of the 45-minute interview, and doodled monkey heads on a pad of paper.

Flappy Bird was released for free on May 24, 2013 first for iOS with little fanfare by a Vietnam-based developer called .GEARS. Nguyen says he coded the game over two or three days. The game mechanics were simple yet irritatingly difficult. Tapping on your smartphone screen, players navigated a pixilated bird through narrow corridors of green pipes that looked suspiciously like the pipes found in Nintendo Nintendo’s Super Mario Bros.—something that Nguyen says that was coincidental. (He also denied reports that Nintendo had sent him a legal threat, or that it had anything to do with him killing the app.) Striking any surface resulted in instant death. Your chance of death multiplied exponentially with each gate you passed.

Nguyen has several other top app store games, including Super Ball Juggling and Shuriken Block, which are currently #6 and #18 on the iOS store, respectively. Nguyen says that he has no plans to remove those games, which he termed “harmless.” If he thought users were getting addicted, however, he said he would not hesitate to also take them down.

In mulling whether to pull Flappy Bird, Nguyen said that it was guilt – atop the fact that “my life has not been as comfortable as I was before” – that motivated him. “I couldn’t sleep,” he said. He added that his conscience is relieved; he spent the past few days, Internet-free, catching up on slumber.

“I don’t think it’s a mistake,” he says. “I have thought it through.”

We haven’t heard the last of Nguyen. He says he will continue to develop games. “After the success of Flappy Bird, I feel more confident, and I have freedom to do what I want to do.”

And Flappy Bird addicts should have nothing to worry about, as there are certainly no shortages of Flappy Bird replacements. Clones have stormed the App store with names like Flappy Plane, Flappy Whale, Flappy Penguin and Flappy Angry Bird. Nguyen said he probably won’t take legal action against any copycats. “I have tried playing Ironpants,” he added. “It’s a good game.”

When asked if there’s anything he wanted to tell disappointed users of the authentic Flappy Bird, Nguyen was concise: “Thank you very much for playing my game.”

The Most Egregious Flappy Bird Clones

The Most Egregious Flappy Bird Clones

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Flappy Bird

“Flappy Bird” has come and gone. Despite the reported $50,000 a day in ad revenue it was pulling in, Vietnamese games developer Dong Nguyen took it down on Febuary 9, 2014. Numerous clones have stormed the iOS App Store and Google Play in an attempt to capitalize on the game’s success.

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More On The Flappy Bird Saga:

The Bird Lord Speaks: Why We Should Believe In ‘Flappy Bird’ Creator Dong Nguyen

‘Flappy Bird’ Creator Follows Through, Game Removed From App Stores

‘Flappy Bird’ Review: Winged Fury

‘Flappy Bird’ Makes $50,000 A Day: Will Nintendo Take Notice?

As Dong Nguyen Removes His Game, Who Is The True Winner Of Flappy Bird?

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forbes.com

The Bottom Feeder: Why Indie Developers Go Insane

jeff-vogel.blogspot.com

We all have our little mantras we use to get through the day.

We all have our little mantras we use to get through the day.

After I started writing games in 1994 and went full-time in 1995, I soon came to a conclusion about the people who do what I do for a living: "These people are all crazy."

Then, as I got older, I realized that I am crazy too.

Then, as I got even older, I switched to a better truth: Everyone is crazy. Every human has his or her damage. Nobody gets out of this world alive.

It's just that indie developers tend to have high visibility, high stress, and small support groups. These factors mean that, when these devs break, you see it, and it's spectacular. Twitter has only helped to make self-immolation faster, easier, and more public.

A lot of people love indie games because they are can so clearly be the product of real people. They aren't focus-grouped, penny-pinching, soulless chum. At their best, they have character. You might not like my games, but you can tell I CARE. They're works of love, recognizably the product of passionate brains.

And, since we care about the product of these brains so much, it's sometimes worthy to look at the brains themselves. Brains that spend half their time receiving more accolades than they deserve and half their time being the target of laserlike hate. These crazy, crazy brains.

I wanted to write a bit about the brain of the indie developer under stress. I don't want pity. I just think someone might find it interesting to read what it can be like to be in this particular box.

Simple. Free. Ad-supported. Indie. Popular. Addictive. BURN IT!

Simple. Free. Ad-supported. Indie. Popular. Addictive. BURN IT!

What Brought This On?

For years now, the iTunes (and lately Google Play) app store has been this gigantic, rushing torrent of infinite money, and everyone has scrambled to grab their piece.

It's the most soulless, joyless, metric-obsessed market/ethics-free-zone imaginable. There is nothing that can't and won't have all fun and creativity sucked out of it to earn an extra penny from the "whales" (i.e. compulsives) who will happily shell out a hundred bucks a month to get Candy Crush Saga to let them play Bejeweled. (Hot tip: Uninstall Candy Crush Saga and play all the Bejeweled you want forever ad-free for three bucks.)

So for the last couple weeks, people, when they weren't raging about EA's pillaging all of their happy memories of Dungeon Keeper, were noting the runaway success of a tiny, free, ad-supported game called Flappy Bird.

Let's be clear. It's not a great game. It was written in three days by a young Vietnamese man named Dong Nguyen. It's really simple, crushingly difficult, pretty derivative, weirdly addictive, and marketed purely by word of mouth. And it became a huge hit, sucking the attention away from a million equally derivative money-sinks.

According to the author, Flappy Bird was averaging $50K a day. So here come the haters ...

Shut up, canada.com.

If You Think There Is Something Bad About Flappy Bird, Here Is Why You Are Wrong

The Internet exists to crap all over everything. And Flappy Bird is simple, silly, derivative, and casual-friendly, so it was sure to bring the self-styled Defenders of Gaming out of the woodwork.

And why do people object to it?

One. The gameplay is similar to many earlier games. Well, of course. Flappy Bird is very similar to a host of press-the-button-to-make-the-helicopter-or-bird-stay-in-the-air games going back years. So what? Here's a news flash. If you write any sort of simple game, there is a %99.999 chance somebody already did it.

You can't copyright gameplay for a reason. If you could, small developers (including me) would never stand a chance.

(Many have claimed that Flappy Bird is a ripoff of a game called Piou Piou, which is laughable if you bother to actually try the games. They play entirely differently.)

Two. The art style is super-similar to early Nintendo games. Yes, Flappy Bird's art is reeeeeally close to some Nintendo games that came out in the last century. I've never seen proof that assets were lifted. It's just similar.

So what? Again, you can't copyright an art style, for a reason. If your art style could never be similar to someone else's, small developers (including me) would never stand a chance.

Three. The game is pretty rough. So what? If people choose to play it, nobody voted you the Queen of Gaming. It is so, SO not your business. I think players of Candy Crush Saga or mobile Dungeon Keeper are getting rooked and could get a lot more similar fun elsewhere for way less money, but I'm not running up and down the subway slapping the iPhones out of their hands.

Want to see people hate on Flappy Birds for no good reason? Look at this gross bit of anti-journalism from Kotaku. As of my writing this, the article begins with an update that basically says, "We changed the title of this article as it was pure slander." (Kotaku has since apologized for this piece, so thanks for that, I guess.)

Or look at this vicious example. Or this straight-out slander from the famed game critics of, um, canada.com. (At least Kotaku apologized.) Or, on the pretentious grad student end, this hilariously bizarre article in The Atlantic.

Or read the petty, jealous comments of any article on it. I promise you the author has. Every single one. Which is why this happened ...

Going ...

Rough Lessons In How Humans Work

Dong Nguyen quit. A fortune coming through the door, and he walked away. As I write this, Flappy Bird has been removed from app stores.

Think about this. I mean you, personally. Think about what it would take to make you run from a gold mine like this. Really. Think about why someone would do this.

This is not about money.

If you've experienced any time as a public figure, especially one that is mainly hated on, it makes a lot of sense.

Dong Nguyen is a young guy. He wrote a game for fun, put it out there, and found himself at the target end of a massive wave of attention, much of it negative. I can't stress enough how insanely terrifying this can be, and he wasn't ready.

Hardly the first time this happened. Remember when Phil Fish, the successful author of Fez, canceled Fez 2 and quit the industry in a fit of pique? I've never been Phil Fish. I don't know exactly what was happening in his head when this happened. But it did happen, and I can totally relate.

It can be hard to understand why someone would kill a product that's making a fortune. Anyone can say, "Oh, gee. He has money. Who cares?"

Well, I promise you, there are things that money can't buy. If you are going mad, you can't buy yourself sane. Some people can take this sort of attention. Not everyone. And some people can take it, but it makes them ... weird.

... going ...

I'm Crazy Too.

I've been the target of my fair share of hate. Real example: E-mails from angry schizophrenics. People who tell me they hope I go out of business and my kids never go to college. Pictures of me Photoshopped in various unflattering ways.

And, of course, the occasional truly unhinged message that I forward to my friends and ask, "Tell me honestly. Should I be worried about my safety here?"

I've been doing this for a long time, and I have a pretty thick skin. Even then, this stuff has an effect. You can't help it. It's part of being human. One angry message has more effect than ten friendly ones. It has a real psychic weight. And, once you know it's there, turning off your computer and avoiding Twitter doesn't remove it.

When my games had their own Humble Bundle, I should have been happy. I mean, I was, in a way. It'll help send my kids to college, and who could argue with that?

Yet, I spent that week in my room quivering with terror. When my developer/writer/artist friends find themselves in similar situations, they are often the same. I've been asked, "This is going so well. Why do I feel horrible all the time?" We neither expect nor deserve sympathy, but that's what happens.

And when an indie dev becomes the hate target of the day, isn't up to it, and loses it a bit, the public responses are the same.

Suppose one day I get one insult too many, I go nuts and quit or freak out. Here's what people will say about me: What a weakling. What a wimp. What an idiot. Why does he care? Why doesn't he just turn the social media off? Why can't he be tough and awesome like me? Screw that guy.

All this, of course, from people who have never experienced being in even remotely the same position.

A Quick Aside

Everyone jokes about how supposedly soulless PR and marketing people are, but dealing with the masses is difficult, time-consuming, and an actual skill. To survive emotionally in a high-profile situation, you need a layer of protection between yourself and the raw feedback of humanity.

If Dong Nguyen got a PR flack, stayed off forums, and just wrote games, he could make a lot of money. However, as he has said himself, this isn't the sort of life he wants to live, and I can't blame him.

But if you've ever seen a public figure (politician, actor, musician, and yes, game designer) have a weird, inexplicable public flame-out, it might make a little bit more sense now.

... gone. You see? Trolling does work!

Nothing Can Be Done, Of Course.

Reality is what it is. We devs would never have our attention and success without the Internet, but you have to take the good with the bad. If you want the attention, you also have to face the Hate Machine.

Sometimes it seems (accurately or not) like every gamer on the Internet seeks out their own little rantbox. A place to direct rage at their chosen target. Young male teens on one side, social justice warriors on the other, general cranks everywhere. Everyone has their axe to grind, and shouting is fun.

People have the right to give feedback, too. If I want to call out the Dungeon Keeper app or the hacky articles I linked to above, it's something I should be allowed to do. If you make your work public, people get to respond.

Trolling is annoying. (Though one man's troll is another man's brave truth-teller.) People troll because it works. When someone writes, "[Some developer] is a moron and his games suck," and the developer reads it, it hurts. You can't prevent it. It's just how our brains work.

I don't think this can ever change. (Though less slander from reporters who should know better would be nice, of course.) It's not about a broken system. It's about understanding, empathy, and remembering that the work you are shouting about was written by another human. An actual human, with feelings and stuff. And humans can be surprisingly fragile.

Saying that won't make any difference, of course. Haters gonna' hate. Trolls gonna' troll. But it feels nice to remind people occasionally, just the same.

Going ...

... going ...

... gone. You see? Trolling does work!

jeff-vogel.blogspot.com

Our Internet Empathy Problem

giantbomb.com

We don’t just have a game culture problem, we have an Internet culture problem.

Today, we have a better understanding of why Flappy Bird developer Dong Nguyen decided his game should no longer be available on the App Store: addiction. An interview with Forbes revealed the developer’s insecurity with how people played it.

“I think it has become a problem,” said Nguyen. “To solve that problem, it’s best to take down Flappy Bird. It’s gone forever.”

Until this morning, his motivations were the source of speculation. (I suspect this will continue to be the case.) It might have been the accusations of theft, it might have been the overwhelming spotlight success brings, and it might have been the torrent of abuse that was spewing forth on his Twitter feed. It might have been a combination of all three or none of the above. There are even some who theorize the virality was faked.

It doesn’t actually matter. Even if Nguyen removed the game for reasons he won’t disclose, reasons far less altruistic than protecting players from themselves, we can still read what has been said about him and to him.

On Sunday afternoon, I became aware of a custom Twitter list that collected some of the horrendous, awful words that had been targeted at Nguyen in the past few days. Many of them were death threats, some merely promised violence, and others shouted obscenities at the top of their digital lungs. Much of it was unequivocally abuse and deeply unsettling. Whether or not these comments impacted Nguyen doesn’t change the fact that they exist. The sheer volume of abuse suggests much of the Internet populace believes there is no consequence for threats conveyed via Twitter or otherwise. There’s good reason for that: they’re right.

Amanda Hess’ “Why Women Aren’t Welcome on the Internet” article, for example, is an excellent and deeply applicable source on how much difficulty our modern legal and security infrastructures have dealing with the evolution of harassment. The tools of harassers are deeply embedded into the fabric of the Internet. Empowerment of the user is king. Unfortunately, it comes at all costs to the victims on the receiving end.

Here are a few examples of what was directed at Nguyen:

Weirdly, much of the vitriol targeted at Nguyen may come from a deep misunderstanding of what’s happening to Flappy Bird. It is not being erased from every iPhone and iPad. While Apple does have a “kill switch” that would allow the company to remotely nuke a piece of software from all of its devices, it has never deployed the “kill switch.” It’s reserved for malware and other havoc-inducing apps. (For example, developers who have snuck emulators onto the App Store hidden have not seen their apps forcefully removed from users who downloaded them before being pulled.) But even if these users better understood Flappy Bird’s ultimate fate, it’s no excuse, and underscores the flippant nature to much of Internet commentary.

What’s one comment in a large sea? Well, It adds up. How many people need to tell you that you’re an asshole in real-life for it to have an impact on your day?

When I linked to the aforementioned Twitter list, it spread quickly, and generated sympathy and questions. I want to respond to some of the commentary that I found troublesome, and explain why what people did to Nguyen underscores some deeper cultural issues about what we consider acceptable Internet behavior.

(I’m not going to publish the actual tweets, just quote them.)

“I’ve never experienced any hate like this but I have to imagine 75% of the world would choose to endure this for 50k a day.”

The most important part of this is “I’ve never experienced any hate like this.” Red flag. The Verge speculated Flappy Bird was generating $50,000 daily. Nguyen’s simply said it’s “a lot.” This has become the de facto excuse for why it’s okay to dismiss Nguyen. He’s rich! Who care if he’s miserable about it? If a person is making a substantial amount of money, the logic goes, that’s reason to put up with whatever the Internet can throw you. (Whether money buys happiness remains an open-ended question in academia.) But this displays an amazing lack of empathy. Can you imagine what it would be like to become a celebrity overnight? No. What gives you the right to evaluate their mental well-being? Why are you allowed to tell them how to feel?

“What mob? The mob of teenage girls who make completely idle death threats? I wouldn’t take this too seriously.”

“but it’s not a real mob though. No one is actually gonna kill this guy.”

A threat sent to former Call of Duty developer Robert Bowling.

It’s hard to take this tweet seriously. What, mind you, is an idle death threat? That such a damningly vague phrase even exists is evidence itself that we’ve allowed discourse on the Internet to reach a point where we’re supposed to be emotionally, mentally, and physically okay with death threats. If someone writes a death threat in a letter or in-person, that individual may be arrested by the police. At the very least, there are consequences. If someone writes a death threat over a social networking service, it’s an “idle threat.”

Words are powerful, and people should be responsible for them. When we characterize threats as “idle,” we remove the individual from the equation. It’s victim blaming. It’s hard to imagine how Nguyen is to blame here.

When the Internet turns on you, it’s hard to describe the emotional rollercoaster that goes along with it. You can’t exactly walk away from the Internet forever. While looking at a long list of abuse Tweets directed at Nguyen, it’s easy to distance yourself from it because, hey, it’s not you. But I’ve been on the other side of that equation, albeit not to the same scale as Nguyen. When someone directs a threat of violence at you, it feels very personal. Every single one of them. When someone photoshops my wife into a photo to try and unsettle me, it feels very god damn personal. You cannot distance yourself from attacks that are directed at you, and to suggest otherwise only underscores one’s lack of experience with the subject. You need a thick skin to survive as a public figure on the Internet, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t chinks in your armor. And as Jim Sterling mentioned on this week’s morning show, it doesn’t mean there isn’t skin underneath. That skin can get raw.

We lack empathy on the Internet. There are people behind every game, every username, every Twitter account.

“what is the discussion at hand here? Should we be allowed to insult and/or threat people via the internet?”

Insult? Yes. Threaten? No. That is not protected speech. Learn how to construct a real argument.

“It’s not that bad. I see worse shit in an average game of Dota.”

This, unfortunately, rings true. It wouldn’t surprise me if, statistically, the gaming audience was found to be more prone to this type of vitriolic commentary than other communities. The hardcore gaming demographic skews young. I’m afraid to imagine what kind of stupid things I might have said on today’s Internet when I was 14-years-old. Many games, especially those online, are competitive, and adrenaline can bring out the worst in us.

But none of these are excuses for such poor behavior, and merely pointing out the problem doesn’t solve it, either. A combination of legal, technological, and societal changes are needed to make the Internet a safer place, especially for critical, dissenting voices. You shouldn’t have to put up with death threats on the Internet, and individuals shouldn’t be allowed to get away with them without a reciprocal impact. This article won’t change that, but the next time a situation like this flares up, you don’t have to contribute to the problem, either.

Don’t be silent. Speak up for targets of harassment. They’re victims, after all.

***

If you’re interested in reading more about Flappy Bird (there’s lots to digest), here are some terrific pieces:

giantbomb.com

Why Can’t We Be Friends? | Northernlion

northernlion.me

I’ve been genuinely called an asshole to my face once in my entire life. I was 22 and drunk at a music festival, and after I finished eating a hot dog, I (accidentally) dropped the wrapper on the ground and walked away without picking it up. A father with his young daughter turned around and yelled at me, asking if I was going to pick it up and put it in the garbage, but I just turned around and walked away without giving him an answer, and he called me an asshole. I totally deserved it.

Now, what if instead of that happening in view of maybe a dozen people, it happened in view of a hundred thousand. And what if they all called me an asshole. Would I have deserved that? Maybe still!

But, what if instead of littering, I was just overweight? Or ugly? Or a woman? Or I made something that people sort of didn’t like? Would that response still be appropriate? Because that’s what happens on the internet every single day and I’m so god damned sick of it.

Although the immediate impetus for this post is Flappy Bird developer Dong Nguyen announcing that he’ll be pulling the game from the App Store due to intense media and public scrutiny, I’ve wanted to make a post about the toxic nature of online interactions for a long time. The fucked up thing is that what’s held me back is the belief that by making a post decrying the ridiculous nature and amount of abuse that people get and give online on a daily basis, I would make myself a target for the same kind of bullshit I’m advocating against. At the very least, I hated the idea that the feedback I’d hear back on this post is the same old chorus of, “people are mean to one another online, get over it” that some people are happy to trot out any time someone expresses unhappiness about the awful way people treat each other over the internet. What I really hate about it is that it somehow implies that it’s okay to be disproportionally terrible to one another online because somehow interactions over the internet are less “real” than those in real life. I don’t know if many people actually believe that deep down, but I know for sure that I disagree.

Growing up, I spent my adolescence and teenage years living in fairly rural areas, and since I (usually) couldn’t drive, most of my interactions with my friends took place online. I would spend hours talking to my friends from school and then at school we’d spend hours talking about what we’d talked about online. Those interactions were real. Every year I meet up with a group of friends that I’ve had since I was 15. We come together from across North America to hang out and catch up, and I consider them probably my best friends in the whole world. I met most of them in an online forum when I was 14. And since I’ve started my YouTube channel, I frequently get messages from people telling me that my videos have helped entertain them, or comfort them, or even soothe them and help them get through hard times in their lives. So much of my life is shaped and affected by interactions that I’ve had online. If we’re going to accept that the internet can provide us with positive relationships like support groups, friendships, and relationships that have a meaningfully positive impact on our lives, can we really believe that it’s not totally destructive when someone abuses someone else in an email, tweet, or blog post? If an online friendship can mean as much as an offline one, can’t an online insult hurt as much?

Even if they’re not directly comparable, you have to consider the sheer magnitude of the abuse that some online figures experience. Even I, as a relatively non-controversial and only mildly notable online figure, deal with repeated flak against me as a person (as opposed to my content) on a regular basis. I kind of have bad teeth. Do you know how many people had told me that my teeth were fucked up prior to posting videos on YouTube? Maybe 1 or 2 over the course of my entire life up to that point. Now, I guarantee you can pull up any one of my videos with my face in it and find some disparaging comments about how awful my mouth looks. Hearing it once or twice is one thing, but when it’s reinforced all the time, that idea crystallizes in your brain. Having bad teeth is now part of my identity that I carry with me and get anxiety about now and then because of online interactions. And I’m lucky that that’s more or less all I get, honestly. I feel so much sympathy for people online who are much easier targets for abuse than I am because the internet can be kind of a shitty place and it takes courage to put yourself out there again and again when your efforts are met with derision or, in some extreme cases, threats. Whenever someone has a meltdown online, people tell them to “grow a thicker skin”, as if they would stand up better to the same repeated negative pressure. The reality of the situation is that it’s death by a thousand paper cuts — almost everyone can handle a little abuse, but not everyone can handle the insane magnitude that just existing on the internet can often attract.

And that’s why I sympathize with people like Dong Nguyen and Phil Fish who are willingly choosing to distance themselves from attention. Although this is not a “games problem”, abuse like this is a problem that exists in games and honestly I think we should feel bad about it. I don’t want to end this post with some naive call to action about how we’re going to fix toxicity online starting tomorrow, but I would love it if we could be a little bit more thoughtful about the way that we communicate online. If you start having a bit of empathy for the person you’re talking to or about, it makes it very difficult to feel good or even self-righteous about being kind of a dick. I’m not perfect either, and probably none of us ever will be, but even a small improvement makes a world of difference.

tl;dr don’t be a dick

northernlion.me

Flappy Bird and inspired cloning: Indie devs explore what made a controversial game fun

polygon.com

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Will we ever find out the “real” story behind Flappy Bird?

There have been endless words written about the game, and its creator has been painted as both a villain and a victim. Dong Nguyen may be someone who understood how to game the system, or an indie developer who is innocent of the ways of mobile apps. The game has been called a scam, while others have praised many aspects of its design and execution.

Other developers have shrugged and done what developers do: They went to work making games based on, or inspired by, Flappy Bird. The results of the so-called Flappy Jam aren’t only much more enjoyable that you’d expect, they actively explore what made the original so fascinating to so many people.

Flapping, parabolas and fun

Regardless of how Flappy Bird came to be on the top of the app charts, the fact remains that masses of people played, enjoyed and discussed the game. There was something there that grabbed the imagination of a wide audience. What made the game so unique?

Terry Cavanagh used the aesthetics of his sublime Super Hexagon to create a game called Maverick Bird, and added the music of Kozilek for good measure. The mechanics are similar to Flappy Bird, but what little theme was there has been stripped away, leaving only stylized representations of the player and obstacles.

It’s also a whole lot of fun.

Maverick Bird may seem like a clone of classic games like Helicopter or even contemporary games like Jetpack Joyride, but the “flap” action is what sets it apart. You don’t hold a button to go up and let go to sink, you have to constantly hit the “flap” button to move in a parabola. The need to keep track of that angle, and to continually decide when to push and to know where that action will send you is the trick. It’s not easy, but Cavanagh decides to loosen up the hitboxes significantly; his take on the premise isn’t nearly as punishing as the original.

I have to wonder, is this considered canon?

This is why the Flappy Jam has been so worthwhile, even if it sometimes seems as if indie developers deal with most kinds of stress or controversy with a game jam of some kind. This journey to figure out why people were playing the game, and then to put their own spin on it, has led to some rather brilliant games.

Flappybalt comes from Canabalt creator Adam Saltsman, using that game’s visual language. Instead of a flowing level, Flabbybalt holds you in a rectangle with a spiked floor and ceiling. You have to bounce off the walls, while avoiding spikes that move up and down. Again, the game forces you to deal with that parabola, and to have a sense for how the character moves. It demands precision, and so far my high score is only six. This is another simple game that uses the basic ideas of Flappy Bird but turns it into something a bit more interesting, almost claustrophobic, but much more enjoyable.

Creation through limitation

And this is why jams have such worth for developers, and why they often seem like a go-to solution for so many things. It’s useful to look at a game like Flappy Bird and strip it down to its component parts, to try to figure out what makes it enjoyable, and to then to play with those ideas to see what comes out the other end. Cloning a game for profit is one thing, but this is the equivalent of covering a song while putting your own spin on it; a process that often teaches the listener more about both the source material and the artist recording it.

I’m not sure Flappy Bird could ever work as a Twine-based text game, but I’m also sure the person who created it found out. I’ve seen plenty of people on social networks roll their eyes at the idea of a Flappy Bird Jam, or say they’re tired of hearing about it at all, but I have trouble being cynical about the process when the end result has been so fascinating.

Heck, Sesame Street got in on the action, and Flappy Bert is worth a try just for the audio samples. Hit Space to Flap is also fun, at least the first time. The joke gets a bit old after that.

Floculus Bird, a virtual reality version of Flappy Bird that’s played with the Oculus Rift, is much more interesting. You’re still flying on a 2D plane, but you can look to the left and the right, and above and below you, and the feeling of actually being a bird flying on a 2D path through the pipes from Mario Bros. is one of the stranger experiences one can have in gaming.

The game also keeps the punishing hitboxes from the original, so you lose if you so much as touch any of the pipes. This creates a crazy sensation of having to constantly be looking both above and below you as you flap through the pipes; you need to make sure there is always clearance in both directions. You bob your head up and down, up and down, while flapping in that cursed parabola, trying your best to avoid hitting the pipe.

It’s not fun, not with hitboxes this unforgiving, but I’m not sure it’s supposed to be fun. I’m not sure if Flappy Bird was ever fun. But it’s interesting. The way my head moves is weird, and it’s a byproduct of what the game asks me to do. I’ve finally found out where all the pipes are coming from in the sky (there is one big, long pipe up there and the rest come down from it) and what is to the left and right of the screen (round green hills and what look like apartment buildings) but then I have to wonder, is this considered canon?

The idea of a canonical Flappy Bird actually went through my head as I made notes about these games, and it was too silly not to share. The story of what happened and why when it comes to Flappy Bird is still being told, but I’m just glad smart people who make interesting games found an excuse to explore a game that many people seemed to find beneath contempt.

The act of trying to figure out why people like something is always more fulfilling than condemning them for that enjoyment, and that seems to have been the purpose, and ultimate success, of the Flappy Jam.

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polygon.com

Our Flappy Dystopia

mattiebrice.com

I’m going to get right to it: any critique or reporting on games that doesn’t include an intersectional perspective on the presence of capitalism in games is incomplete. There’s little else more avoided than the topics of anti-capitalism and class politics in games press and conferences outside of the usual fetishized rags to riches fables. Having money to start with is already a large part of this, but how our societies are organized by valuing people and things by their monetary value above all else structures how we talk about games. It says who gets listened to, who gets noticed, and who is valued.

Why mainstream spaces have a tight lid on these issues is simple: they would be at the very center of critique. There is something unspoken, that of COURSE we’re all run by money. But to say it outloud is taboo, and it’s seen as rudely airing someone’s dirty laundry. That we are aware that the methods of how many institutions make money are unethical but are okay with keeping it just below the surface since we know others are doing it is a cause for extreme alarm.

We, as global, national, and artistic communities, justify a lot of shitty things on the premise of making money. This industry justifies sexism, racism, and all forms of discrimination and oppression because of some unwritten right to make money. Why can’t we have equal representation of minorities in our media? Because someone wants to make money. Why aren’t there more minorities writing about minority issues in a time of heightened social justice on sites that pay fair wages? Because someone wants to make money. Why are the weird free games made commonly by minority artists that play a huge role in changing how we think of the medium excluded from news coverage and conference talks? Because someone wants to make money.

It doesn’t sound nice when it’s constantly called out, does it? Because it isn’t. There is a price tag to participating in games. The mainstream culture of games development demands you are from a class of people who could go into computer science or digital art training and have enough resources to handle an industry that has a terrible track record with labor issues. The standard success story of someone in the games media is a person who can afford to keep up with the newest products and has the resources to write for free or low-wage for about two years. Important conferences, even when you’re invited to speak, often cost hundreds if not thousands of dollars to attend. Knowing that poverty and other forms of economic discrimination disproportionately affects minorities, not including anti-capitalist critique effectively erases the struggle people face on the uneven plane we all convene upon in this community. This is why people at the top shrug at their homogeneity; they are unwilling to see the effects of capitalism on their hiring and creation practices, and even more unwilling to enact change, often with a ‘I got mine’ attitude.

Capitalism is informing what creations are considered good and of value, and what are bad form and derivative. Gamers and others see quality in games that show high production value, and defame games that seem to be a waste of money in this model, EVEN IF THEY ARE FREE GAMES. The idea of success outside the conventional method of capitalism, which is intersectional in its effects, is met with contempt. ‘Success’ is also very dubious and misguided; simply having a lot of attention for a period of time is considered successful, even if all that attention is harassment and you are not better off personally or economically for it. As much attention as the DIY ethos had in the past few years, minority creators are still impoverished while indie games that incorporate marginalized themes and design philosophies into the acceptable model receive praise like pets at dog shows. It’s not necessarily their fault, it’s that the system chooses what looks like it from the margins to seem adaptive. In the end, the system is perpetuating itself, only allowing games and people complicit with how things are going to thrive.

Now let’s enter in Flappy Bird. For some context, Flappy Bird was a mobile game that became the focus of ire and slander because it had pipes in it, similar to those in the Super Mario Bros. series. Or, more precisely, it was making a lot of money off what was billed as theft. I say was because it’s now removed from the app store after the creator, Dong Nguyen, received endless harassment. Jason Schreier’s article and Twitter reactions best embody how the conversation started, though as you can see from some of the edits, there’s been a change of tone. Robert Yang already did a great summation of what was wrong with how Jason and others handled the issue; what interests me the most is how this extreme situation exposed the capitalistic influence in games and the manner it excludes and defames.

Unfortunately, this settles on what’s considered a ‘real’ game, an obsession many people at the top of the community and industry occupy themselves with. The conversation of what is and isn’t a game is often, intentionally or not, used to assign value to already established gaming conventions that benefit the established system and marginalize works that do not look like it, and therefore threaten it. Mobile games are often slated as ‘casual’ games, which people in the gaming press and development overall side-eye as a genre of games mostly just looking to grab people’s money. Except, well, that’s ALL of AAA games, such as the hype around how much Grand Theft Auto V made despite that it was profiting off of flagrant sexism and racism. Mobile games, on the other hand, do not often pander to mainstream gaming audiences’ tastes, and seeing that they go for mass appeal, obtaining fortune is always seen as a negative thing. Sophie Houlden pointed out this contradiction in a recent confluence of events; King, developer of the viral and profitable Candy Crush Saga, acted in a way that is considered unsurprising for mobile developers by trying to trademark and bully other games that have the words ‘candy’ and ‘saga’ in them. The games community was, of course, quick rise against perceived soulless developers and protest with a game jam. But then, a game makes money off of having a reference, maybe, to a ‘real’ game, Super Mario Bros., and is now perceived as stealing. ‘Candy’ and ‘saga’ can’t belong to developers, but green pipes are rightfully Nintendo’s. A quick google image search of Jonathan Blow’s Braid can not only reveal that the indie darling also uses green pipes, but also uses analogues, very obvious references, to Mario’s enemies, mechanics, and story line. It’s entire premise is predicated on people having played Mario, yet we don’t have publications saying Jonathan stole from Nintendo.

Dong is considered an outsider. Who is he? From Vietnam? Oh, that explains this ‘knock-off’ rhetoric people are using. Indie creators are notoriously capitalizing on the nostalgia of the late 80s and 90s gaming culture, with difficult puzzle platformers and action side scrollers as far as the Steam library can go. No one is accusing these devs as stealing from Nintendo and Sega, despite the lineage being extremely clear and borrowed as homage. It’s because the gaming community set up a success narrative for certain indie, mostly white, mostly men, mostly from English-speaking countries, developers who strive to make smaller games competitive with the big dogs. Ultimately, indie games play into the same capitalist model, to the point where many are attached to big publishers on distribution platforms like the PS4. Most indie games strive to be addictive entertainment just like AAA ones do and employ similar kinds of people with a shared background. Indies can stay because they don’t threaten how big business works; instead, they merged right in with it. To this industry, using those green pipes was sacrilege, with the horrific possibility that, in Jason’s words, “some kids might grow up thinking these are ‘Flappy Bird pipes.’” What, exactly, is so bad about that?

The anxiety the industry is facing pairs with its diversity problems. Video games backed itself into a corner by becoming highly specialized for a very particular audience, ‘hardcore gamers.’ They developed conventions, genres, marketing tactics, merchandise, PR cycles, and an entire culture that serves a very narrow idea so they could easily profit off of it. Because of social justice activism and outside pressure from a society that sees gaming as grotesque, awareness about how exclusionary games are is at critical mass and the industry is scrambling to answer. It has no fucking clue how to market to and include minority members of their community and in the world at large. So when Farmville, Peggle, Candy Crush Saga, and Flappy Bird appeal to this mysterious audience big budget and scrappy indies can’t seem to tap, it’s foul play. They are exploitative and unfair. But this same attitude is applied to more avant-garde work that comes up against what it means to be a ‘real’ game, such as Analogue: A Hate Story, Problem Attic, and dys4ia. If games that came from the general DIY movement represented a new standard, it would reveal the institution of video games to be a huge scam. A scam that exploits its workers, exploits the suffering of minorities, exploits the complicity of consumerism. For money not to affect design and coverage anymore would completely change the landscape of games, both how we interact with and speak about them. Simply dispersing the focus on the conventional game design aimed at certain kinds of players would turn the industry upside down.

Be wary of any piece of critical writing and reporting that doesn’t expose and interrogate how capitalism is at work. Not accounting for how the industry moves money and to whom and why keeps us groggy as to why we have the problems that we do. We know this isn’t a meritocracy, that this system values us by our monetary worth decided by its own standards. If we really want to move forward, if we want to remove oppression and breathe life into games, we can’t take the industry and throw in some brown people and queers, we have to establish a community that is inherently inclusive from the get-go. A community past capitalism.

This article was community supported! Consider donating or being my patron so I can continue writing: Support

mattiebrice.com

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